When they approached the lone Texans fan on staff (on any news staff, anywhere?) to write about the 2026 Houston Texans, he sighed.
The Texans have a noxious cloud following their presence in any news setting after their embarrassing splattering against the Patriots. It colors the way we think about them right now. They also, for reasons I will get into below, rate as a pretty boring team to talk about from a fantasy football perspective even though they have some interesting playing-time situations.
▶ 2025 Houston Texans Stats (Rank)
- Points per game: 23.8 (13th)
- Total yards per game: 327 (18th)
- Plays per game: 64 (6th)
- Dropbacks per game: 41.1 (9th)
- Dropback EPA per play: 0.08 (17th)
- Designed rush attempts per game: 27.1 (10th)
- Rush EPA per play: -0.15 (30th)
▶ Are you ready for some 1980s football?
Because that’s what the Texans want to play. They haven’t been particularly subtle about this. They traded a fourth-round pick for David Montgomery, signed new offensive linemen Braden Smith and Wyatt Teller, who both are older but with big run-blocking pedigrees, and drafted guard/center Keylan Rutledge in the first round as someone who they believe can get a lot of movement in the running game. They also reeled in Marlin Klein in the second round to help add depth at tight end so they can be one of several teams cosplaying the Rams 13-personnel stuff last year. (Last year, the Texans were second in the NFL in using six-linemen formations at 18 percent per FTN’s numbers crew — this is because they didn’t have enough healthy tight ends they actually trusted. This team gave playing time to Brenden Bates and Harrison Bryant last year. They also led the NFL in three-wide sets at 71 percent.)
The major investment in the receiving room this offseason, in comparison, was the aptly-named Lewis Bond, a sixth-round pick. Those offensive linemen additions may help C.J. Stroud’s protection — it’s certainly on the table — but that was not the main reason they were added.
Houston wants to take the air out of the ball and let their all-world defense beat the hell out of you. It’s something they showed us in 2024 when they added Joe Mixon and it’s something they wanted to do last year before Mixon was sidelined with a mysterious foot injury based on a training and recovery period that would have made Alex Guerrero want a second opinion. Without Mixon, they simply didn’t have the talent to do it last year. 30th in rush EPA tells the story well, and the Texans leaned on Stroud’s arm before his concussion because they couldn’t trust Nick Chubb to do more than what was blocked or Woody Marks to generate positive yardage.
I do think the way the Texans are going about building this offense is curious. I know the world is down on Stroud after his last two games were very public meltdowns, but the Texans were a much better passing offense with Stroud in shotgun — their DVOA out of that was 2.0 percent compared to -13.3 percent without it. I’ll spare you a debate about the merits of offensive philosophy and just leave it at: I think a lot of the public discourse about how we perceive Stroud is endemic to the way this team has decided it wants to play offense. That’s not to say Stroud is not capable of major mistakes, as we all saw very loudly last January, but to me most of the discourse about regression from him is just a combination of an unsustainably hot 2023 run and an offense designed to never ask him to make that run again.
▶ Passing Game
QB: C.J. Stroud, Davis Mills
WR: Nico Collins, Xavier Hutchinson
WR: Jayden Higgins, Jared Wayne
WR: Tank Dell, Jaylin Noel
TE: Dalton Schultz, Foster Moreau
An above-average quarterback on a team that doesn’t want to pass carries very low fantasy football upside. That is where we’re at with Stroud at this point. He’s a worthwhile superflex starter based on efficiency, but he’s also missed games in each of the last two seasons with concussions. I think very highly of his talent despite the underachieving, but you won’t catch me equating that with fantasy football gold, no matter what OC Nick Caley says about his growth this offseason. Essentially a free quarterback in drafts right now, Stroud probably should just be a waiver wire call in standard leagues. There are simply much higher upside stabs you can make at the position in his same draft range too — give me Malik Willis or Tyler Shough any day.
Nico Collins runs some of the hottest per-touch splits in the league and is obviously enormously physically talented. He also has never even played 16 games in five seasons in the NFL. I understand people gravitate towards looking for the next breakout player and they simply look at the touches he gets and think “the Texans should use him more.” Well, the assumption of rational coaching has been with us this whole time with Collins. I think he’s one of the weaker top-25 ADP stabs in the league right now based on his injury history and the way the Texans figure to play football. He’ll be a good low-end WR1, maybe a high-end WR2, when healthy. But in that range of the draft when you stack him against A.J. Brown with Drake Maye? That’s not a hard choice for me. It’s hard to buy the idea that Collins is finally going to break out with a top-five wideout season in his sixth year on a team that hates throwing.
The other targets on this team are hard to value. Dalton Schultz has traditionally been a low-end TE1 when healthy for the Texans and had the highest number of targets of his career last year, but he won’t play as many snaps with the Texans having more healthy tight ends this year. There is — again — not much of a ceiling case to be made here. He has five touchdown catches over his last two seasons. Schultz is essentially free in drafts right now, hovering outside the top-20 tight ends. There are a few players ahead of him I think you can make a case to draft him over, but the reward here is a bunch of 5/56 statlines and 7.5 PPR point sort of games.
Then there’s the other wideouts. Jayden Higgins is going off the board outside of the top-50 wideouts, Tank Dell and Jaylin Noel are both going outside the top-200 picks altogether on most sites. This is a market desperately waiting to be identified. All of these players carry some real upside. Ultimately I think the price-to-potential-earnings ratio is best on Dell, since we’ve at least seen him do it before, but we’re talking about players that may struggle to reach 8-to-10 targets a game. For what it’s worth: I can tell you things I like about each of these three players. I didn’t understand why Noel was shackled to the bench most of last season for Christian Kirk. But it’s hard to tell you any of them is a presumptive favorite to get a major target share, and even if one of them wins a major role, the upside is sketchy. Are they going to beat out a healthy Collins in the pecking order? Probably not.
DAVID MONTGOMERY 35-YARD HOUSE CALL
— NFL (@NFL) December 5, 2025
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▶ Running Game
RB: David Montgomery, Woody Marks, Jawhar Jordan
OL (L-R): Aireontae Ersery, Wyatt Teller, Keylan Rutledge, Ed Ingram, Braden Smith
Alright, time to find the one player on this offense I can’t imagine fading. Montgomery is free money on most sites at this point. He’s going outside the top-20 running backs in ADP on almost every site, and I think he has a chance to finish as a top-10 back this year. Montgomery was a trusted third-down back with the Bears for years, only really losing the role in Detroit because they happened to draft one of the best passing-down backs in the entire NFL in Jahmyr Gibbs. The Texans clearly think he can handle it as well even if they might rest him on a few. In 2024, Mixon was given 245 carries and 52 targets in just 14 games in a very similar situation, and he returned fantasy value even behind a bad offensive line with 12 total touchdowns. If Mixon had played all 17 games, he was on pace for 341 touches, which would have put him fifth in the league.
If anything, Montgomery splitting time with Gibbs over the last few years likely kept some tread off his tires. Injuries will tell the tale of the season, and Montgomery is no spring chicken in his age-29 season, but we’ve seen no major statistical red flags so far. I don’t think Marks will manage more than a small share of this backfield, and think if Jordan were healthy down the stretch Marks might have been in a committee in the playoffs as well. To me, this offense is Montgomery’s show.
▶ 2026 Houston Texans Win Total
DraftKings Over/Under: 9.5
Pick: Over (-125)
This defense could somehow be better in 2026? Kayden McDonald gives them a stab at the kind of interior presence they’ve never had over the course of this run, and Reed Blankenship adds stability to the back seven that they were lacking last year after the surprise release of C.J. Gardner-Johnson. Injuries can happen and I wouldn’t be itching to bet this months ahead of the season starting, but as we sit here near the beginning of July, it’s hard to find a more talented defense than this. Ka’imi Fairbairn, the official player of Rotoworld’s in-season NFL slack channel, has been nails the last two years.
The offense? It will continue to exist. Maybe it takes a step forward and makes them a legitimate contender. Maybe not. Either way, it’s not like there’s much they have to do besides not get in the defense’s way to find 10 wins again — something they’ve done in every year of the DeMeco Ryans Era.
